“Stop Painting” is an exhibition conceived by artist Peter Fischli on view at the historic palazzo of Ca’ Corner della Regina, Fondazione Prada’s Venetian venue, from 22 May to 21 November 2021. The press preview will take place on Wednesday 19 May. 

Described by Peter Fischli as “a kaleidoscope of repudiated gestures”, the project explores a series of specific ruptures within the history of painting in the last 150 years, intertwined with the emergence of new social factors and cultural values. The exhibition also intends to understand if the current digital revolution can also cause a new crisis of painting or, on the contrary, contribute to its renewal. 

“Was the recurring ghost telling the story of the end of painting a phantom problem? And if yes, can phantoms be real?”. These were Fischli’s doubts at the beginning of the process leading to the conception of his exhibition. In an attempt to answer these and other open questions, he identified 5 radical ruptures that marked artistic paradigm shifts through rejection and reinvention of painting: the diffusion of photography, the invention of the readymade and the collage, “the death of the author”, the critique of painting as a commodity and the crisis of criticism in the late capitalist society. 

The artist conceived this exhibition divided in 10 sections as a plurality of different narratives told by himself in the first person. The show begins on the ground floor of Ca’ Corner della Regina with a new site-specific artwork by Fischli that consists of a scaled-down model of the entire project, defined by the artist as “a sculpture of a painting exhibition”. “Stop Painting,” which brings together more than 110 artworks, unfolds on the first floor of Ca’ Corner della Regina following not a chronological order, but a personal and idiosyncratic approach. The display consists of a system of temporary walls that cross and cut through the spaces, passing through the thresholds that connect the different rooms. A selection of works by more than 80 artists, also disseminated on the ground floor, in the courtyard, and in the staircase of Ca’ Corner della Regina, constitutes the intersecting storylines that form the exhibition “Stop Painting”.